The two vulnerabilities in question were patched in the Microsoft Office Word 2000 suite in June 2009, almost three years ago.

At that time, Microsoft put out a critical security bulletin—MS09-027—to close the holes, which can allow an attacker to get control of a system if a user opens a maliciously crafted Word file.

Much more in the article.

These Office Word 2000 installs on Mac OS X should have been patched by users for 3 years now.

Another troubling situation is that the malware seems to be targeting Snow Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X; not Lion.

With Lion the particular memory address being abused to run shellcode isn’t vulnerable like in earlier versions of Mac OS X.

So, if you have ANY version of Microsoft Office software running on your Mac, make sure it is up to date.

Better yet, if you have any software running on your Mac make sure it is updated including MS Office, Java, and other Internet facing programs, as well as Mac OS X itself. This should be obvious to must Mac users by now, but certainly bears repeating.

This is not just a Mac problem, but it has been exacerbated on Macs because getting MS updates for MS Office on the Mac apparently hasn’t been done as religiously as it often is on MS Windows systems, which are also vulnerable by the way.

Malware in 2011
By analyzing malicious code we can determine which threats types and attack vectors are being employed. The endpoint is often the last line of defense, but it can often be the first-line of defense against attacks that spread using USB storage devices, insecure network connections and compromised, infected websites. Symantec’s cloud-based technology and reputation systems can also help to identify and block new and emerging attacks that haven’t been seen before, such as new targeted attacks employing previously unknown zero-day exploits. Analysis of malware activity trends both in the cloud and at the endpoint can help to shed light on the wider nature of threats confronting businesses, especially from blended attacks and threats facing mobile workers.

Corresponding to their large internet populations, the United States, China and India remained the top sources for overall malicious activity. …

The reference about religious sites?

Moreover, religious and ideological sites were found to have triple the average number of threats per infected site than adult/pornographic sites. We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free – it’s not good for repeat business.

And here’s just one more small area of the report:

Exploiting the Web: Attack toolkits, rootkits and social networking threats

Attack toolkits, which allow criminals to create new malware and assemble an entire attack without having to write the software from scratch, account for nearly two-thirds (61%) of all threat activity on malicious websites. As these kits become more widespread, robust and easier to use, this number is expected to climb. New exploits are quickly incorporated into attack kits. Each new toolkit version released during the year is accompanied with increased malicious Web attack activity. As a new version emerges that incorporates new exploit functionality, we see an increased use of it in the wild, making as much use of the new exploits until potential victims have patched their systems. For example, the number of attacks using the Blackhole toolkit, which was very active in 2010, dropped to a few hundred attacks per day in the middle of 2011, but re-emerged with newer versions generating hundreds of thousands of infection attempts per day towards the end of the year.

On average, attack toolkits contain around 10 different exploits, mostly focusing on browser independent plug-in vulnerabilities like Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Java. Popular kits can be updated every few days and each update may trigger a wave of new attacks.

They are relatively easy to find and sold on the underground black market and web forums. Prices range from $40 to $4,000. …

The whole report is well worth a read! There is only so much you can put into an article.

A new, sneakier variant of the Flashback malware was uncovered yesterday by the French security firm Intego.

Flashback.S, which Intego described Monday, uses the same Java vulnerability as an earlier version that has infected an estimated 820,000 Macs since its appearance and still plagues over 600,000 machines.

But unlike Flashback.K, the variant that first surfaced last month and has caused consternation among Mac users, Flashback.S never asks the victim to enter an administrative password for installation, but instead relies only on the silent exploit of the Java bug to sneak onto the system.

“The differences are very subtle,” Peter James, a spokesman for Intego, said in an interview Tuesday. “There’s no password request [by Flashback.S].”

Much more in the two page article.

Apple will likely need to update their seek and destroy tool very quickly to help users stay free of this new variant.

If you think you are beginning to need an antivirus/antimalware solution, there are quite a few out there. Below are just a few:

And others from Intego Virus Barrier for Mac free and Pro versions available in the Mac App Store. Intego as noted above found this newest FlashBack in the wild). Other Mac antivirus firms Symantec/Norton, and many more.

Many of these come with a heavy CPU usage hit that is very annoying considering the small number of actual threats out there for the Mac. Of course some users may feel that the ones that provide real time protection are the way to go, some may feel it is worth it if their Macs are speedy enough and they have enough RAM.

For those who don’t think they need a Mac antivirus just yet, if you don’t use Java or none of your programs use Java, you could go to the ~/Applications/Utilities/Java Preferences.app and disable Java until you actually need it and then re-enable it as needed. It’s a very easy thing to do really.

Some additional locations to add can be found at MrAnderson.info here.

Also installing Piriform CCleaner for Mac is a great idea and can be run as needed very quickly every day even.

Certainly less of a system resource hit and one could still have a non-resident antivirus and scan at your convenience and respond if the Applescript tells you something is going on that you didn’t instigate by installing a program, etc.

The Applescript monitoring locations that you can set up is built with Mac OS X which is light on resources and free. The Applescript monitoring does a similar thing as WinPatrol does in Windows – but of course in a very small area comparatively. WinPatrol does so much more but the key similarity is the monitoring for changes to areas that malware can hit a Windows PC.

What we need for people who are not very savvy about these things is a MacPatrol app like WinPatrol.

A second variant of the Mac OS X Trojan referred to as Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a or SX/Sabpab-A is exploiting a Microsoft Word security hole, not the usual Java vulnerabilities used before.

Just a few days ago, a new Mac OS X Trojan was spotted in the wild that exploited Java vulnerabilities and required no user interaction to infect your Apple Mac, just like the Flashback Trojan. Kaspersky referred to it as “Backdoor.OSX.SabPub.a” while Sophoscalled it at “SX/Sabpab-A.” Now, both security firms have confirmed a different variant of this new Trojan that infects Macs by exploiting Microsoft Word, not Java.

Sophos detects the malicious Word documents as Troj/DocOSXDr-A and points to the following Microsoft Security Bulletin: MS09-027. Kaspersky meanwhile points to this security bulletin for the same Microsoft Word security hole: CVE-2009-0563.

So, it looks like uninstalling Java or disabling it is not the biggest threat afterall. 😉 Now you need to upgrade your Microsoft Office software to protect you from this.

Very important to do, and updating your Java is very important too through Apple Software Updates as Apple put out another update that not only fixed the problem, it also removed the malware infection if found.